Friday, January 05, 2007

EN GHADA

Ghada Karmi, a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, writes for the Guardian and is an occasional interviewee on BBC World News where she generally blathers on endlessly about the evils of the Israelis or the Americans.

In her latest Guardian article, which was reprinted in the Melbourne Age as Humiliation at the end of a rope, she claims to be shocked at Saddam Hussein's execution and asks "what was the executioner's hurry?"

To her mind, part of the reason was to stop Saddam "revealing secrets about the West's past enthusiasm in supporting and arming his regime. Hence he was tried on the relatively minor charge of killing 148 people in the village of Dujail..."

Could anybody possibly believe that such tripe can emanate from a so-called academic?

The claim that the West supported and armed Saddam while he was waging his war on Iran, which incidentally claimed hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, is not new and is definitely not a secret. It has been repeated often and it it isn't accurate and wouldn't worry or embarrass America or Britain one iota. The fact is that while Saddam gained a small measure of support from the U.S.A, he was principally armed at the time by the Russians and the French and we know that they had nothing to do with America's war in Irak - in fact they did their level best to prevent it.

And Ghada might believe by her standards that the killing of 148 Kurds was small peanuts but she should tell that to the relatives of those who Saddam and his henchmen murdered, gassed, bombed, tortured, maimed and otherwise harmed during his reign as the Iraki dictator.

Of course, such matters are always peanuts for the pathological advocates of the cause of Palestinian terror in the British media.

For them, the victims of suicide bombings and Quassam rocket attacks are also relatively minor matters to be conveniently airbrushed out of any discussion on the situation in this part of the world.

Ghada certainly has a different philiosphy with regard suicide bombers than she has with genocidal mass murderers like Saddam Hussein.

The Palestinian suicide bombers have summarily executed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians over the past decade and although Karmi claims to be against suicide bombers, she has no problems with explaining and rationalising their actions.

In a series of speeches sponsored by the Dawn Group of Newspapers in Pakistan, Karmi was asked if she thought that the suicide bombings in Israel were detracting from the Palestinian cause; was she pro-suicide bombing; and why did Palestinians choose this method of warfare above media manipulation, propaganda, and other methods (as if to say that the Palestinians don't resort to those things !)?

Karmi explained that Palestinians do not call the suicide bombings "suicide" in Arabic; they are known as "martyrdom operations" justified by the perpetrators as "legitimate responses to Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilian populations."

"Believe me, when Israel says they are killing Hamas terrorists or extremists, they are planting their bombs in such a way that they kill civilians, everyone knows this. The suicide bombings are a retaliation to these civilian deaths." Karmi is saying therefore justifying the blowing up of kids in school buses as some sort of retaliation to civilian deaths in Israeli counterterrorism operations.

She claims that personally she is not in favor of this violent method, but she says that it is a result of the lack of a well-armed, well-organized resistance to Israeli occupation. "The war between Israel and Palestine is an asymmetrical one, with F-16s and Apache helicopters on one side and only human bombs on the other." (More justification for Palestinian crimes against humanity).

To make the audience understand the mindset of a Palestinian suicide bomber, she related the experience of a 45-year-old man who was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint ("they really are barricades, not checkpoints"), and told that if he wanted to pass the checkpoint, he would have to strip and walk naked past them. The man removed his clothes in the pouring rain, but was so ashamed that he lay face down in the mud, while his young sons were watching his humiliation from the other side of the barrier. "Whenever I put this scenario to Western audiences, and I ask them that if this were their father and they saw this happen to them, would they not want to go and kill all the Israelis they can? And they always have no answer."

She went on to clarify further that she did not think suicide bombing was an acceptable way to deal with the issue of Palestinian statehood, but that it could at least partly be attributed to a leadership vacuum for the Palestinians as Israel has indefinitely jailed the one man who is universally seen as an acceptable heir to Yasir Arafat’s rule: Marwan Barghouti.

Barghouti of course, is a convicted murderer and he received a far more transparent and open trial than do those who are accused by the Palestinians of "collaborating" with the Israelis. The trials of these people usually last a full 10 minutes and there's little value in appealing because the "guilty" are usually shot outside the courtoom within minutes of being sentenced.